Mastering Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0

8.1. Site Collections

We've mentioned site collections before; a separate top-level site and corresponding subsites form the SharePoint site collection used throughout this book. A separate site collection is obviously very different from a subsite. But from a user perspective, it looks the same. A site's a site, it's all just different URLs. Otherwise a top-level site looks like a subsite. It is possible to create all new site collections, with their own top-level site and subsites, but why would you want to do such a thing?

Unlike a new site or subsite, a new site collection does not inherit anything from the previous sites—although they all share global settings and web-application settings, which will be discussed later. This lack of inheritance ...